Frank Pavone founded Priests for Life, an anti-abortion group, and chaired Catholics for Trump. The Vatican laicized or defrocked him without appeal for blasphemous communications on social media and disobedience of his bishop. He placed an aborted fetus on the altar and made a video. He is also an election denier.
Several women have come forward to allege he groomed and sexually harassed them while they worked at Priests for Life. The complaints go back over twenty years. The Diocese of Amarillo received at least two complaints by 2010, but it seems as no action was taken. Priest for Life also received complaints and a fellow priest reported that he sexually harassed a woman who came to him for counsel.
He and Priests for Life claim these women who once worked for them are doing it for political reasons. They were so anti-choice that they worked at Priests for Life, but we are now supposed to believe they are making up lies to discredit him politically? Also, how is it that several women coming forward at different times over more than twenty year have remarkably similar experiences of the same kind of encroaching conduct?
- The Catholic Pillar: Pavone was accused of ‘sexual misconduct’ before laicization
- The Catholic Pillar: Another woman comes forward with Pavone allegations
- America, the Jesuit Review: I once defended Frank Pavone. Now I realize he groomed me, too.
Inside the Unholy Sex Scandal Rocking Trump’s Ex-Adviser
!["It was considered a big honor. Here is this super important person, if you're from that subculture," she says,
of working at Priests for Life.
Morson, who has herself reported extensively on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, says it took years for
her to realize that she too had been groomed by Pavone.
"I've listened to women talk about all the stuff that they got confused by, when they were being groomed by
their abusers," she says. "I guess until these women came forward [about Pavone] I never really thought
about all of the stuff that made me uncomfortable."
Morson also says Anthony DeStefano, then Priests for Life's executive director, acknowledged to her that
meetings held in private quarters were inappropriate, but she does not believe any action was taken.
For Morson, the breaking point came on a Sunday evening in 2000, at a diner in Staten Island. Pavone had
taken her out to eat, and told her about an exciting new project.
Morson says Pavone told her that he and Greg Cunnginham, an anti-abortion activist and executive director
of the Center for BioEthical Reform, had come into possession of explicit footage of illegal abortion
procedures filmed in the developing world, in countries where the treatment was illegal. (Cunningham's
group is known for displaying large, graphic posters of abortion procedures and fetal remains at college
campuses and shopping malls.)
Pavone was thrilled, Morson says, at how graphic the videos were. When Morson asked how the videos had
been made, she says Pavone told her a videographer had been paid to film covertly.
"The more that this conversation went, he was genuinely shocked that I was not excited about this," Morson
says. She was shocked that, as a so-called "pro-lifer," Pavone didn't see the hypocrisy in filming women who
were undergoing illegal procedures that could potentially be life-threatening.](https://goppredator.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/image-23-1.png?w=1024)
![In 2004, she was a recent college graduate, had just started working at the organization as an intern, she told
The Pillar.
"[Pavone] started on the flirty-flirty touching, paying way too much attention to me, touching my hair, or
stroking my back," Worthington told the outlet. "He would just walk up to me in the office, and keep his hand
on my arm, stroke my hair at my desk, or put his hand on the small of my back, where it was also halfway on
my bottom."
Worthington says the workplace environment at Priests for Life was inappropriate, and she was frequently
asked to do things that felt uncomfortable, like filing documents in Pavone's bedroom. When she drove
Pavone to the airport, he would touch her legs. He nicknamed her his ''favorite college student," she says.
She described the harassment as "constant," saying it made her "dread" to go to work.
"I always just sat there cringing, thinking 'Don't touch me. Just please don't touch me,'" Worthington told The
Pillar.
Finally, after an incident in which Pavone backed her up against the wall, stroking her hair and shoulder,
Worthington says, she quit.
Worthington says she then confided in her father, who called Angelo DeStefano, Priests for Life's executive
director, to complain.
"DeStefano told my dad that I didn't understand, and that [Pavone] was just very affectionate," Worthington
told The Pillar.](https://goppredator.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/image-25-1.png?w=1024)
